My wife and I were sitting on our front porch one evening this summer, having a drink and watching the sunlight head west up the street, and she said, “This is the best room in the house.” And I agreed. And that’s how this year’s Nest Issue got its theme.
A Busy Beaver’s Kitchen
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As founder and CEO of Busy Beaver Button Company, Christen Carter has plenty to do. But she heads home for lunch almost daily to enjoy the kitchen in her Palmer Square apartment—on the top floor of a 1912 two-flat she owns a mere four blocks from the brand-new Busy Beaver factory, which opened last month to great fanfare.
In 2000 Virginia Heaven was back home in Chicago, taking a quick break from a curatorial job in Saudi Arabia and looking to get out of her increasingly cramped Ukrainian Village rental, when she toured a 2,400-square-foot vintage condo for sale in Rogers Park. The British-born fashion scholar, now an assistant professor at Columbia College, was so impressed with the living room’s peaked wood ceilings, arched windows, and Spanish architectural accents that she had a contract signed before hopping the plane back to Riyadh at week’s end. “It never stops being magical,” she says.
The rehab features walls made of recycled planks and palettes, ceilings insulated with straw bales, solar heat, simple furniture, and a few choice artworks. The other two thirds of the structure is a neighborhood-kid magnet: Klein’s teenage son, Brice, keeps his trampoline there. —Lisa Skolnik
“How are we going to do the beheadings?” Jackie Seiden recalls one of her three grandchildren wondering aloud on a visit from London two summers ago. The kids—Bella, Ollie, and Eva, then nine, seven, and three—were working on a play about Henry VIII to perform for family and friends.
